Even vs odd numbers are not as important as we think they are. We could do the same to any other prime number. 2 is the only even prime (meaning it is divisible by 2) 3 is the only number divisible by 3. 5 is the only prime divisible by 5. When you think about the definition of prime numbers, this is a trivial conclusion.
With 2, the natural numbers divide into equal halves. One of which we call odd and the other even. And we use this property a lot in math.
If you do it with 3, then one group is going to be a third and the other two thirds (ignore that both sets are infinite, you may assume a continuous finite subset of the natural numbers for this argument).
And this imbalance only gets worse with bigger primes.
So yes, 2 is special. It is the first and smallest prime and it is the number that primarily underlies concepts such as balance, symmetry, duplication and equality.
But why would you divide the numbers to two sets? It is reasonable for when considering 2, but if you really want to generalize, for 3 you’d need to divide the numbers to three sets. One that divide by 3, one that has remainder of 1 and one that has remainder of 2. This way you have 3 symmetric sets of numbers and you can give them special names and find their special properties and assign importance to them. This can also be done for 5 with 5 symmetric sets, 7, 11, and any other prime number.
Not sure about how relevant this in reality, but when it comes to alternating series, this might be relevant. For example the Fourier series expansion of cosine and other trig function?
True, but normally, you’d introduce trig functions before complex numbers. Anyhow: I appreciate the meme and the complete over the top discussion about it :D
Not necessarily, plenty of good programs written in C89 for example.
With something that is heavily library dependent, having a more recent development stack may mean better maintained libraries but definitely not a sure thing.
And that proves what exactly? Swiss law required them to hand over an IP address. Swiss ptivacy is not absolute. They have laws. An IP address didn’t grant them access to the encrypted emails. Proton openly admits they had no idea who the user was. The activist should have used a VPN, which Proton also offers as a service, and then whatever activity trail they linked to the IP would have died at Proton’s VPN network.
I self-host (postfix and dovecot) and will admit of all the self-hosted stuff I have it’s the most annoying/time-consuming to manage but doable if you’re willing to spend a lot of time reading and updating things. I wouldn’t recommend it to the vast majority of people though.
I read some horror stories about folks who self-hosted for years and how they eventually quit and moved to an established email provider. It didn’t seem like something I wanted to deal with.
Do you think using one of those federated email networks where it’s invite only and between people you know would have any appreciable use cases in conjunction with an established provider? I can think of having a small org use it maybe but not between friends or family.
Five and eleven eyes doesn’t matter if the service is encrypted and open sourced. Also, did you know that Switzerland has no superior privacy laws comparing to Germany? It’s all marketing bluff.
As a US consumer, I can’t use a lot of these VPNs. When you dig into how local governments are trying to break encryption in many countries overseas it makes you slow to sign up for services. The worst case would be you use a service, get invested and a few weeks later new legislation you’re not following/in the know about gets passed and some of your data is now in some foreign governments jurisdiction more so than it was before.
It’s not that Germany or Sweden in particular do that today but I also haven’t quite looked into its bounds, if five-eyes alliance reaches them, etc. There is a lot you have to be cognizant of.
Also I like Bitwarden but Vaultwarden is the way to go; just make sure to donate/pay somehow for bitwarden if you use its clients.
The thing is, ownership of any of these can change at any time. Bitwarden, Mullvad, and Tutanota could be sold to very different owners.
That is up to and including something like uBlock Origin, which only has one developer, and would suddenly be very different if that developer died and the project had to be forked.
You can never trust that the person who takes on the reigns has the same ideals as the people running them now.
Hell, Mullvad was abused to the point they removed access to Port Forwarding on their VPN service, which has led to many people needing to switch to crummier, shadier VPNs that still offer port forwarding access. That’s not Mullvad’s fault, but it is an example of them having to change their philosophy and what they offer because of abuse.
Trust should only go so far, and loss of trust should be very easy. There’s not a good reason to keep “trusting” something when it has fundamentally changed from its initial ideals.
Hell, Mullvad was abused to the point they removed access to Port Forwarding on their VPN service, which has led to many people needing to switch to crummier, shadier VPNs that still offer port forwarding access. That’s not Mullvad’s fault, but it is an example of them having to change their philosophy and what they offer because of abuse.
Hell, Mullvad was abused to the point they removed access to Port Forwarding on their VPN service, which has led to many people needing to switch to crummier, shadier VPNs that still offer port forwarding access.
Unfortunately port forwarding also allows avenues for abuse, which in some cases can result in a far worse experience for the majority of our users. Regrettably individuals have frequently used this feature to host undesirable content and malicious services from ports that are forwarded from our VPN servers. This has led to law enforcement contacting us, our IPs getting blacklisted, and hosting providers cancelling us.
The result is that it affects the majority of our users negatively, because they cannot use our service without having services being blocked.
The abuse vector of port forwarding has caught up with us, and today we announce the discontinuation of support for port forwarding. This means that if you are a user of forwarded ports, you will not be able to add or modify the ports you have in use.
They made a smart call that has probably increased the long term privacy of their users.
People were using port forwarding to host illegal shit, and governments were getting pissed off about it. Mullvad has been able to prove in court that they don’t keep logs, but that’s not a perfect deterrent; a properly motivated government, perhaps if somebody is using Mullvad to host CSAM, might attempt to legally force Mullvad to put logging in and add anti-canary clauses.
Preventing port forwarding keeps customers as consumers rather than hosters, and avoids this issue.
I used to use proton until I saw them give info for a warrant. After that I gave up on the VPN thing. If I lived in a country with limited streaming options I might use them but shrug-outta-hecks
This is true and people should always be mindful of this. Additionally you should consider not just the ownership of the companies but also the infrastructure they rely on such as their rented servers, payment processors, on-site staff etc. However commercial VPNs remain a convenient compromise for many use cases. These services are probably fine for your shitposing needs but should not be relied upon for activism for instance.
The taxonomy in biology can be really confusing. Potatoes (only their fruits), peppers, cucumbers, eggplants, avocados, lemons, oranges, kiwifruit and papayas are also in the berry club.
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